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proves my credit line is unequivocally limited.
    My ability to impress my wife is limited, although within reasonable bounds, and she does give me do-overs.
    There are limits to how much coffee you can drink before your eyelids quiver like hummingbird wings. There are limits to the number of cheese curds you can eat during a Packers game, although you’d be surprised. My patience is limited, especially with myself, especially when I do the same dumb things, over and over, again and again. In fact, in that context I could do with way more limits.
    And under the category of modern heartbreak, there are limits to unlimited internet.
    Just to prove I am open minded, I will entertain the idea that there are no limits to how long you can be put on hold while figuring out the limits to your unlimited internet, how far you can go without directions, or how deeply you can love a child.
    The person who screwed the license plate holder to that car would say I’ve clearly and obstinately missed the point, and fair enough. What you have here is a person offering encouragement. Or, even better, exhortation. On any given Thursday morning we could all use a little exhortation. And maybe there was more to the message: THERE ARE NO LIMITS was printed across the top half of the plate holder, but the bottom half had snapped off, meaning I couldn’t read the rest.
    I found this limiting.
THE ROAD
    Back home on the farm someone else is doing the chicken chores, because I’ve been on the road, and somewhere along the line on some ribbon of concrete a green mile marker flipped by and I thought, well, there’s a metaphor on a stick, and I began to wonder just how many of those I’ve flashed past, and then it struck me that the more germane question would be how many more I’ll flash past. This line of thinking caused me to hold the wheel a tad tighter, but it was a good sunny day and I had Townes Van Zandt on the CD player, so I couldn’t maintain that level of grim focus, although in the moment it did occur to me that Townes was one of the too, too many we sadly file under Gone Too Soon, and I drove with two hands a few miles more.
    When it comes to symbolic rumination, the road with a capital “R” is one of your top five metaphor generators, and it’s easy, even when you are sliding along at just under seventy miles per hour with heated seats or chilled air, to construe that you are an explorer on the journey of a lifetime, because you are. Never mind that the journey does not cease just because you’re at a stoplight. Metaphors are no fun if you stretch them too thin. No, it’s more fun to think of ourselves on the move because that creates the impression that we are getting somewhere.
    We are zipping along, though, and movement—movement of your own accord, I should say—is freedom made manifest. You really can’t overstate that one, even if you’re just popping over to the donut shop for coffee and a cruller. The world holds peopleby the millions who have never known the feeling of freewheeling. I try to remember this when I look up and see I still have half a day’s drive ahead of me before I see the ones I love. I try to remind myself then that the intervening miles are not to be overcome but rather to be sailed. It’s a blessing, the open road.
    I used to spend a lot of time on the road with truckers, writing about their work and ways. My Uncle Stan was a trucker, and one of the few people for whom I still entertain the word hero. He took me across the country on eighteen wheels when I was a young man, and thus I gratefully blame his memory for the itch I feel when I’m on the back forty and hear the distant hollow howl of a set of doolies crossing the interstate rumble strip. Uncle Stan taught me to read the road; when you see a dark patch on the concrete, you watch for a bump just prior—the dark patch is caused by drops of oil jarred from the pans of